Dropping her hand, Richard grabbed the bar and lifted off the seat, staring in the direction of the cry.

Tessa looked, too. The gondola beneath them, the one containing the woman and the boy, rocked like a porch swing gone berserk.

Wide-eyed and trembling, the woman looked from car to car. “Help, please! My son!”

In her arms, the boy shook violently.

Tessa gasped.

“Oh, my God.” Richard blanched. “He’s seizing.”

“He has epilepsy!” The mother clutched her boy, but he thrashed beyond control.

The buzzing crowd didn’t respond. They couldn’t hear or see.

Richard settled back onto the seat. “She can’t restrain him. He’ll throw himself out of the car or break a limb. I’ve got to get down there.”

His clinical assessment made her blood run cold. She grabbed his arm, sinking her fingers into his bicep. “We’re at least a hundred feet high.”

“I need to get to that kid.” He swung onto the seat and, kneeling, squinted into the twilight.

She followed his gaze to the beam at their rear. Between parallel rows of light bulbs protruded widely spaced metal rungs, creating a ladder of sorts. Their car, the Ferris wheel, the earth below—they all seesawed in a vertiginous heave. “Richard, no.”

His phone, keys, and wallet clattered onto the seat.

Her lungs constricted. She struggled to force out a word. “Please. Don’t do this.”

He thrust his hat in her hands. “I need you to lean forward and don’t rock the car. If you shift your weight, you’ll counterbalance mine. Then, when I step out, the car will swing forward fast. You’ll have to hold on tight.”

Explained step-by-step, the plan almost seemed logical. But it wasn’t, of course—it was madness.

He swiveled on the bench and, rising, extended one leg. Laying his chest on the seat top, he groped, unseeing, for the first rung on the beam. “Got it.” He released his breath on a grunt, rotated, and shifted his weight onto that back foot.

Pale fingers clamped onto the seat. The gondola swung backward, and her stomach heaved like she might be sick. Turning halfway around, she slipped the hat under one thigh and edged forward.

Steadying the car, he slowly lifted his other leg up and over the seat.

She met his gaze. “You don’t have to do this.” Even as she spoke, she knew her words were futile. Saving people was what Richard Bruce did. He lifted his lips in a smile she knew was entirely for her benefit.

“Hold on, sweetheart. Everything will be okay.”

She nodded and spun, skootching as far forward as possible and tightening her fingers around the bar. Bracing herself, she stared at the convulsing boy and his frantic mother—and beyond them to the crowd below.